> it's not a whole lot of an argument just to
> say "most people don't care that it's wrong."

My point was how can you say that something's wrong? What, if not common usage, do you use as a grounds for determining what's right and what isn't?


> Despite Morris' passionate stance in favour of
> language being defined by common usage (which
> is a stance that strikes me as being the exact
> opposite of what I'm used to Morris saying),

Heh. I admit I have pretty much about-faced on this since the last grammar nazi thread. It's been a couple of years, actually, and since then I've gone and tried to learn a little bit about language, and the most pervading thing I've seen in any book or website I've read on the topic of linguistics is that common usage makes language. So, for example, people who object to pronouncing "comfortable" as "KUMF-ter-ble" are wasting their breath, because everyone pronounces it that way,*** and it is the standard pronunciation in speech, despite not even being listed in many dictionaries (or at leat not the one right here).

-Eric "/'kVmftRbUl/ (Kir.)" Sleator
Thu 7 Nov A.D. 2002

***To be fair, there probably are some people who don't pronounce it this way. The only alternatives I've ever seen pedants offer, though, were "KUM-fer-ta-ble", which I've only heard people say as a joke (or when English was their second language), and "KUMF-ta-ble", which I've quite honestly never in my entire life heard anyone actually say.